ABSTRACT
For more than 20 years a form of urban policy has operated in the United Kingdom. For a decade, from the mid-1960s onwards, a period of what can be seen as urban experimentation was effected by both Harold Wilson’s Labour government and Edward Heath’s Conservative administration. During this period about a dozen separate urban experiments were introduced (Lawless, 1979). Most of them have little contemporary relevance. Two schemes, however, the Community Development Projects initiated by Labour in the late 1960s and the Inner Area Studies commissioned by Peter Walker, then Secretary of State for the Environment in 1972, were to have a longer term impact. They examined the causes for, and suggested possible solutions to, deprivation within the major conurbations. Although they were far from unanimous in their views, two central themes emerged from many of these experiments: urban poverty was widespread and not confined to definable pockets of deprivation and the root cause of deprivation was the contraction in economic opportunities for many inner city residents.
